Art and theater reviews covering Seattle to Olympia, Washington, with other art, literature and personal commentary.
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Thursday, October 10, 2013

Marilyn Frasca’s “Like This” at Childhood’s End

The Weekly Volcano, Oct. 10, 2013

And Then the Boys Played War

The 71 drawings in Marilyn Frasca’s “Like This,” at Childhood’s
End are stunning. It is an exhibition of drawings done since 2001. All of the
drawings are done with pastel or other media drawn into monoprints. Each
picture tells a story, be it the story of Squaxin Indians recreating an
historic canoe trip or depictions of Native American legends, be it a tender
rendition of people with their animals, or art about the horror of war and the
events of Sept. 11, 2001. They are memories and events real and imagined, created
with sensitivity to form, balance, texture; and each picture, no matter how
real or how detailed, began with what the Surrealists called automatic writing
— marks on a surface derived from the artist’s unconscious.

There is power here. And love. And humanity.

Witness

The earliest drawing in the show is a little black and white
image that Frasca created by inking a Plexiglass plate, messing around with it
and finally driving her Subaru over it to create an abstract image of densely
textured areas. The piece is called "Terror of the Situation."
It looks like a horse’s head. Frasca said, “This is something Gurdjieff refers
to in his writings that happens to people when they are pondering very
difficult questions. At the time I made this I was deeply disturbed by the USA
support for war.”

Every other piece in the show is an outgrowth of this in
which she created textured areas on paper

One Song

through similarly made monoprints, and
then, over time, studied the textural areas until she found images within the
abstract forms and drew them out with pastels or other drawing implements. Many
of the earlier ones were reactions to the attacks on Sept. 11. The whole back
wall of the gallery consists of war-related images made in this way, including
a large drawing of two Palestinian women standing in front of Picasso’s great
anti-war painting “Guernica.” One of the women is holding a candle, which
resonates with the arm holding a lamp in Picasso’s painting, a metaphor for
light shown on the horror of war. A nearby wall text includes a clipping from
Maureen Dowd’s column in the New York Times which said that when Colin Powell
addressed the U.N. in the buildup to the Iraq War he had “Guernica,” which
hangs in the U.N., covered up because he could not make the case for going to
war with it in view.

Each picture in Frasca’s show is a dialog between the abstract
and the figurative; between smooth, flat areas of color and roughly textured
shapes; between the conscious and the unconscious; between images seen and
images imagined.

A drawing called “A Gathering” is almost completely filled with
a large textured area that looks like a rugged Cliffside with — as if she grew
out of the cliff — a winged angel to the far right. The angel is the only
recognizable image, and everything except her face is filled with the original
textural marks. At the opposite extreme formally, none of the original texture
remains in “Daily Practice.” It is an image of a woman with outstretched arms
upon which three birds are perched. Somewhere between these in terms of the
balance between abstract textures and realistic figure drawing is “Where Ever
We Go,” a drawing of two standing women in which the textured areas become
robes or shrouds that wrap around the two figures. Only the head of one woman
can be seen, and only the eyes of the other.

Like This

The piece from which the show takes its title is “Like
This.” It pictures a person holding two masks in his hands. One is a dull gray
mask of a face with no eyeballs. It covers the person’s face. The other mask is
yellow and its tongue is sticking out. As the person changes masks he or she
becomes “like this” and then “like this.” The artist said that it was only
after completing the drawing that she learned that both masks are traditional
in Native American culture.

A canoe journey inspired “Leaving Squaxin.” Every year the
Squaxin Island Indians paddle more than 100 canoes throughout Puget Sound to
celebrate the revival of traditional travel on the ancestral highways of the
coastal Pacific Northwest, stopping at indigenous territories along the way for
cultural celebration and sharing. In 2012 they landed on the beach below
Frasca’s home. She was astounded by the sight and to commemorate this event she
created this largest work in the show, a picture of an Indian woman paddling
her canoe. It is one of the few pieces in the show in which the textures are
allowed on the body. It is as if the woman’s body is transparent and you can
see these rich textures through her arms. Metaphorically perhaps that would be
the history of the tribe seen on her flesh.

One of my favorite pieces, partially because it is so
different from all the others, is “The Far Shore,” showing a fisherman in a
stormy sea near a rugged coastline. It reminds me a lot of some of Winslow
Homer’s watercolors of fishermen on stormy seas. There are also two little wash
drawings that are entirely different from everything else in the show. They are
among the newest pieces and may be harbingers of what’s to come next.

This may well be the best show you will see this year. It is
an exhibition should that should be shown in a major museum featuring works by
a woman who, by all rights, should be represented by big-time galleries in New
York and Los Angeles. Count yourself lucky that we have it at Childhood’s End
in Olympia.

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About Me

I am an artist and writer. My paintings are shown primarily in galleries in Tacoma and Olympia, Washington. I write an art review column and arts features for the Weekly Volcano, a community theater review column for The (Tacoma) News Tribune and regular arts features for Thurston Talk (Olympia).
My published novels are:Return to Freedom, Reunion at the etside, The Backside of Nowhere, The Wives of Marty Winters, Imprudent Zeal and Until the Dawn. I've also published a book on art, As If Art Matters. All are available on amazon.com and http://www.claytonworkspublishing.com.
I grew up in Tupelo and Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and have been living in the Pacific Northwest since 1988 where I am active in many progressive organizations such as PFLAG (Parents, Family and Friends of Lesbians and Gays).